Biosphere's 2nd CD for Touch after Cirque [Touch # TO:46, 2000] is a double CD
in digipac designed by Jon Wozencroft.

CDOne - Substrata
Originally released in 1997 on All Saints Records, this remastered version of Substrata contains 11 tracks with a total length of 55:20. "...by many (the undersigned included) considered to be the finest ambient album of the 1990s" [Motion/State 51], and "Three years after its release, BIOSPHERE's 'Substrata' is already being recognised as one of the all time greats of deep electronica." [Top Magazine]

CDTwo - Man with a Movie Camera
contains 9 tracks, total length 53:32. The first 7 tracks consist of the soundtrack
to "Man with a Movie Camera" [Vertov, 1926, USSR], originally commissioned for the Tromsø International Film Festival in 1996, released here for the first time. The last
2 tracks, Endurium and The End of the Cyclone, were originally released on the limited edition Japanese version of Substrata in 1997 - they have never before been released outside Japan.

Review:
'Substrata' has quietly garnered a reputation as one of the last decade's notable Ambient recordings, and while this remastering does not diverge radically from the 1997 edition on All Saints - edges are softened, balance gently tweaked - having the excuse to listen to it anew reveals a logic often obscured by its subaquatic haze. Steeped in echo, 'Substrata' uses a healthy dose of ambient noise (airplane buzz, street sounds, bird calls) to flesh out its liquid lyricism; it treads the line between music and sound, but errs just on this side of music, returning again and again to deep, resonant melodies. But elsewhere Biosphere's temporal suspension, via cycling arpeggios and long, blurred sustain, updates classic Ambient music's indeterminacy with string laden pastoralism. Of the two bonus tracks included from the original Japanese edition, 'Eardurium', which revolves uneasily around a single focal point, shows Geir Jenssen at his most hypnotic, applying the trappings of Techno (metallic, repetative beats, four bar chord progressions) to an Ambient sound palette that slips mercurially into less recognisable terrain. The second CD features Biosphere's 1996 soundtrack (co-produced with Mental Overdrive's Per Martinsen) for Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent film, 'Man With A Movie Camera'. Like 'Substrata', with which it shares samples, the score makes generous use of field recordings, but it's more ominous and less melodic. When played along with a video of the film, it makes for a curious accompaniment, pitting Biosphere's mellifluous drones against Vertov's choppy montage. What's fascinating, in pairing the two, is the realisation that music so rarely has approximated cinematic syntax; it's disappointing then, that Biosphere's soundtrack doesn't hew to the language of cinema more closely. After Vertov's delicate tightrope walk between representation and non-representation, you wish for something less patently musical, and more like Chris Watson's field recordings. Of course, a jerry-rigged home viewing is bound to produce some fortuitous moments, entirely unplanned (and unrepeatable) given the difficulty of cuing the tracks precisely. Otherwise Biosphere's thousand league ambiance has always been too fluid to mimic Vertov's disjointed sequences. [Philip Sherburne]
The Wire, UK